Most Kokang are descendants of Chinese speakers who migrated to what is now Shan State in the 18th century. In the mid-17th century, the Yang clan, a Chinese military house that fled with the Ming loyalists from Nanjing to Yunnan Province, and later migrated to the Shan State in eastern Myanmar, formed a feudal state called Kokang. From the 1960s to 1989, the area was ruled by the Communist Party of Burma, and after the dissolution of that party in 1989 it became a special region of Myanmar.

^Burma has other, non-Kokang populations of Han Chinese; depending on what area of China they originally immigrated from, these populations speak Yunnanese, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese. See Mya Than (1997). "The Ethnic Chinese in Myanmar and their Identity". In Leo Suryadinata. Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. pp. 117&ndash, 8. ISBN981-3055-58-8.